18. Rowan
ROWAN
I’ve heard many impossible things in my life.
Men begging for their lives with a gun already pressed to their temple and promising everything in their name, including their own children. Friends swearing eternal loyalty right before they put a knife in your back. Children crying while their fathers bleed out on the ground from a deal gone bad.
But nothing has ever struck me as violently absurd as Sofia’s quiet, trembling confession.
Ivan?
Killing his own beloved sister?
For a moment I can only stare at her, every instinct I possess rejecting the idea outright. It isn’t just far-fetched, it’s fantastical. Irena Kuznetsova was the only softness Ivan ever allowed himself. I remember the rare grief in his eyes whenever she is brought up in conversation.
Whenever the anniversary of her death comes, he shut himself off from the world, working himself raw and drinking until even I couldn’t stand to watch. A man like that doesn’t fake that kind of pain. It’s impossible to manufacture mourning that deep.
And yet Sofia’s tears are real. Her doubt about her uncle’s love is real.
Her father, this stranger who abandoned her before she could ever seek comfort from him, has managed to twist her into believing the most ludicrous, venomous lie imaginable.
It makes something ugly and furious unfurl inside my chest. Protective instincts flare in a way I can’t begin to understand though refuse to question.
“Sofia, your uncle loved your mother. He would never harm her. Whatever your father told you isn’t true,” I say firmly, cupping her damp cheeks with my rough hands. My thumbs brush away fresh tears even as they continue to fall.
She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and pulls away from me to slide out of my bed. She’s shaking slightly, but there’s something beneath the trembling that looks almost determined in a wounded sense.
“I’ll be right back,” she says.
“Sofia.”
But she’s already moving.
She grabs my T-shirt from the floor and slips it over her naked body. The hem falls nearly to her thighs, the dark fabric swallowing her small frame. For a split second I’m too stunned to react and stop her from leaving, to warn her that someone might see her slipping out of my room.
She twists the handle and pulls the door open, disappearing into the hallway before shutting the door behind her.
I sit frozen in the middle of my bed, naked and still half-hard from the way we’d been pressed together minutes ago.
I let out a sigh and drop back onto the mattress, one arm flung over my eyes, the other fisted in the sheets as my pulse hammers inside my chest. The room is quiet, but my mind is anything but.
I drag my hand down my face, feeling the faint impression of the bruises from Ivan’s punishment still there. By now, they have mostly faded, but the memory of his fists still lingers like a branding.
After what feels like ten minutes have come and gone, the door to my room opens again without a knock of warning.
I sit up to catch Sofia slip back inside, her laptop clutched to her chest like a shield. Before I can open my mouth to ask her what the hell she’s doing, she flings it onto the bed beside me and crawls up after it.
I slap my palm over the laptop before she can open it. “Stop. Listen to me—”
“No, Rowan.” She shoves at my shoulder, trying to move me to retrieve her laptop. “You’re going to look at what I found. Then you can judge for yourself.”
This woman will be the death of me.
I drag a hand down my face but release the laptop, only to hook an arm around her waist and pull her into my lap before she can squirm away.
She lets out a small gasp but doesn’t fight me.
Instead, she settles back against my chest, her body fitting flush with mine like it was made to be there, and opens the laptop.
Her fingers move quickly over the keyboard. Document after document appears, notes typed in frantic bursts that I force myself to read. It’s a transcript of her meeting with her father, documented almost like a stream of consciousness.
Her father speaks of meeting Irena for the first time back when they were teenagers, calling her “the love of his life” over and over.
He describes her as bright and stubborn, much too gentle for the family she was born into, a girl with laughter in her mouth and steel in her spine.
He says Ivan hated him from the beginning.
That he saw him as unworthy and a threat to the future he intended to build around his family’s bloodline.
The conversation moves to an elopement and a pregnancy, the birth of Sofia that followed. He speaks about holding her as a newborn and Irena crying because she feared Ivan would take the baby away to keep her in Moscow, and of their promises made while the house slept to leave.
Then his exile. How he was forced out onto the unforgiving streets of the city with nothing but the clothes on his back. His supposedly begging Irena to leave with him and run away like they planned from the family that had controlled her all her life.
Every line is crafted to paint him as a victim.
A man who lost everything, including his daughter who he one day hoped would learn the truth.
The same one he never bothered coming back for after the tragic death of his wife.
It doesn’t at all shock me, nor am I surprised this is the angle he decided to go in.
How else would he have gotten his only child on his side after years of no contact?
Never mind the fact that if he believed the Kuznetsovs to be so dangerous, leaving his only child in the hands of such a monster would have been sacrificing her to the wolves.
If he truly believed Irena had been trapped and controlled, why leave Sofia behind to be raised under that same family?
It doesn’t make any sense.
Sofia scrolls to a highlighted passage, her finger tapping against the screen. “He said as he was escaping with my mother, that’s when the ‘accident’ happened.”
I exhale slowly.
To an outsider, it’s a compelling story.
A young love crushed beneath family power. A secret marriage. A child born into danger. A woman finally willing to escape, only to die before reaching freedom. A father exiled. A daughter stolen. A brother turned tyrant.
It’s emotional and tragic in all the right ways.
But to me? Convenience is the loudest alarm bell of all.
I tilt my head down toward her, my chin brushing the top of her head. “Sofia… what reason would Ivan have to kill his own sister? She had already gotten married to your father and had you. What sense does that make?”
Sofia turns to look at me. “Obviously because they were running away together and my uncle didn’t want his sister leaving.”
I shake my head. “Why kill her, though? Why go to that extreme if he only wanted to prevent her from running away with a man he didn’t approve of?”
She closes the laptop with a sharp click and turns in my lap to face me fully. “It makes sense if you believe my uncle is not the man he pretends he is. I’m meeting my father again tonight to discuss more of what happened back then. I think you should come with me.”
The refusal is instant. “Absolutely not.”
Her face falls. “Rowan—”
“No,” I repeat. “You are not leaving this estate, and I sure as hell am not escorting you to a man who is obviously trying to manipulate you.”
“He’s not manipulating me,” she snaps back.
“He is, Sofia. You’re just too close to see it.”
Anger flashes in her eyes. “You think I’m stupid? You think I can’t tell when someone is lying to me?”
No, I don’t think she’s stupid, that is the damn problem. If she were, it would be easier to dismiss her conclusions as grief-strung nonsense and lock the door behind them without losing sleep over wondering whether they were true or not.
Reality is much worse than that.
“I think you’re desperate,” I fire back, the words harsher than I mean them to sound. “For answers and a connection with someone outside these walls. Enough to believe whatever story your sperm donor feeds you.”
She recoils as if I slapped her. Her mouth parts, but no sound comes out.
I should apologize.
While I always mean what I say, this isn’t the way I want this conversation to go.
Taking back the words in order to soften them, or do something to stop the look on her face from settling permanently into memory, would solve everything.
But I am too angry to feel rational in this moment.
There is too much at stake to be treating this delicately.
“That’s not fair,” she whispers.
“The truth isn’t fair, Sofia. Get used to it.”
Her face tightens at that.
She shakes her head and quickly pushes away from me.
That is the part I am least prepared for, the sudden absence of her warmth pressed against me.
The space where she had been is cooling too quickly now, as if her body had been the only thing keeping the room from turning back into the cold mausoleum this house has always been.
One moment, she is close enough for me to feel the tremor rolling through her entire body, and the next, she is crossing the room to get away from me, pulling herself back together with shaking hands and a shattered expression.
I almost reach for her.
Her next words are venomous as they spill out of her. “You just don’t want to believe it because it would mean everything you’ve built your life on is a lie. Ivan isn’t who you think he is. Your loyalty has been for a man capable of murdering his own sister despite claiming that he loved her.”
My jaw clenches so hard, pain sparks up the side of my face.
“Think about that,” she spits out at me.
I do.
That is the terrible truth of it all.
I have been thinking about it since the coroner’s office.
Since the file was laid out on my lap and told us the gun that killed her mother was nearly identical to the type used to almost kill my pseudo-father.
I’ve been thinking about this since Nikolai’s warning first curled around my throat and refused to let go.
My muscles tremble with restraint as I fight the urge to snap at her and force the accusation back into the dark, decrepit box where it belongs.
Ivan killing Irena is too obscene to imagine, let alone entertain.
It is a blasphemy against the version of him that I know like the back of my hand.
There is no faking grief like that. I have seen the way he looks at Sofia like she is the last living ember of something he failed to save all those years ago.
But in the back of my mind, something else nags at me.
A different truth. Men have loved what they destroyed before to get what they want, to satisfy whatever desire they may carry that is unattainable without sacrifice.
Power has made monsters out of men like Ivan Kuznetsov. But does that mean that is what has happened in this scenario?
The longer I stare at Sofia, the more anger rises to the surface in her eyes. It is clear to me that all of this is a culmination of her lashing out at the wrong, though most conveniently available, target.
None of that is lost on me no matter how tempting it may be to put her right back in her place.
She is frightened and being haunted by ghosts that have suddenly risen from the ashes of their graves to hunt her down.
Her father’s words have reached into the deepest wound inside her and twisted until she no longer knows where the pain is coming from.
She wants someone to blame.
Ivan is the mountain in the far distance, and I am the nearest cliff face.
I know.
I know this.
So why does it hurt so badly?
She lets out a slow breath. “If you’d just talk to him, Rowan, you would see it for yourself.”
“I said no. The answer will always be no. You can tell me that a thousand times and that answer will never change.”
“Why?” she hisses, stepping forward and pushing at my chest.
I barely move, but the contact burns. It lands too close to the memory of her hands on me earlier when her body trembled beneath mine.
I’m brought back to the impossible softness of her mouth on mine and the way she looked at me after coming with too much trust in her eyes as she slowly drifted to sleep.
Everything about this feels inverted now. The same hands that clung now aim to hurt. The same mouth that gasped my name now throws accusations hard enough to gut me.
“Because he is dangerous and you are not seeing that,” I growl at her.
Her laugh is short and furious. “I am surrounded by dangerous men.”
“This is different.”
“Why?” she challenges. “Because he calls himself my father?”
“Because he wants something from you.”
“You all do in one way or another.”
I go still.
Sofia sees it instantly, assessing it for what it is. Even angry and hurt, she is still able to watch me close enough to see when the fractures in my armor begin to show.
“Everyone wants something from me. Ivan wants obedience, you want me contained. My dad wants…” She falters, trying to come up with something. “I don’t know what he wants. But at least he’s willing to speak to me and give me answers.”
“Again, that’s different.”
She huffs at me before collecting her laptop and her clothes off the floor, keeping my T-shirt on as she storms across the room toward the door.
“Sofia,” I growl. “Come back here.”
She doesn’t stop, completely ignoring me.
“Do not walk out that door.”
I fight the urge to get up and stop her.
I could very easily grab her by her waist and turn her back around, make her face me so she can understand that leaving like this is another kind of fracture.
But the thought of physically stopping her after everything, after accusing Dmitri Orlov of using her and Ivan of controlling her and me following those exact orders, turns my stomach.
I do not want to become another man who proves her right.
So I stay where I am.
The silence that follows after she slams my door shut is deafening.
I sit on the edge of the bed with my head in my hands.
My chest feels like it’s been cracked wide open and every vulnerable piece of my soul is laid out on display to be ridiculed.
The woman I just held and buried myself inside, whose tears I wiped away, just walked out carrying accusations that could destroy the only father figure I have ever known.
Part of me—that small, treacherous part that has been slowly falling apart and cracking since the night she first challenged me—is starting to wonder if she might be right.